I have a headless raspberry PI 4 8GB connected to my TV setup with Kodi and the Jellyfin add-on. Now I would like to have a convenient option to watch Youtube in a privacy-friendly way on the TV.

The experience should be similar to Freetube: creating playlists, search videos, follow subscribed channels. I don’t mind running it either directly on the PI or install it on my server.

Thanks for any recommendations of what you folks use!

  • PlasticQuality7519@reddthat.comEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I’ll tell you what I use, appreciate that it doesn’t cover your needs (I was more focused on avoiding unskippable ads) and it’s a bit fiddly but it might provide a good starting point.

    I also have a RPi 4 8Gb that runs a self-hosted Plex (Jellyfin would work even better arguably). “Playlists” are different Plex libraries.

    For subscriptions, or channels where I want every vid, I have a crontab that wakes up once a week, downloads latest vids via yt-dlp, and puts them in the relevant Plex library.

    For Discovery or ad-hoc vids, I rely on “real” youtube in my PC, and when I find something I want to watch I just manually share the link with a script in the Pi that will pull it via yt-dlp and put it in yet another “adhoc videos” Plex Library.

    It works great for my purposes. A few caveats: There is the usual arms race between yt-dlp and The Formerly Not-Evil Company, so you need to keep updating yt-dlp every week or so. Also, the vids I like are transient, so I delete them after a month or so, but you can choose to archive them differently.

    Don’t hesitate to reach out if you want more details, I can happily yap about it for hours :D

  • Björn@swg-empire.deEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Been a while since I did this. But isn’t there a YouTube plugin for Kodi anymore? Back then I would send videos from my phone to Kodi using Yatse.

    • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Yes, there is a YouTube addon for Kodi. I came here to recommend.

      It’s not perfect for sure. There are some things that are annoying or difficult. I get the feeling that the developer is constantly playing cat and mouse with YouTube. But overall it blocks ads and plays my videos so I use it every day. I’m watching right now…

    • scrooge101@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I ended up with the same solution, but it is a bit lacking and seems to be abandoned. Did you manage to import playlists from other devices?

      • buedi@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        27 days ago

        I never really used Playlists, so I cannot comment on that, sorry. The only thing I do is subscribing to some channels in Invidious when I am on my PC and I do see them in Kodi. Usually I search for what I am interested in and that works fine for me in Kodi and Invidious. Invidious is still in active development, but you meant the Kodi Plugin maybe? I hope it is not abandoned and just not worked on because it still… works? :-)

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    Plex Brand of media server package
    RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
    SBC Single-Board Computer

    2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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